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M.I.A: MAYA

Pete Paphides

July 10 2010, 1:01am, The Times

M.I.AXL Recordings

“I want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavoured French fry. A feature in The New York Times on the Sri Lankan-born, London-raised hip-hop provocatrice M.I.A. ran to several thousand words — but for the basic gist, that single observation was all you needed to know. Two years after Paper Planes made her a star, Maya Arulpragasm enjoys a certain standard of living while aligning herself with the oppressed Tamils of her birthplace. She also doesn’t seem to like America that much, despite she and her boyfriend living there in relative luxury.

Should any of this matter, though? It hasn’t in the past. In 2005, when Arulpragasm eschewed her Mercury Prize live performance for a self-congratulatory film, many still felt that Arular, the…

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